OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Machine Learning based Empirical Evaluation of Cyber Threat Actors High Level Attack Patterns over Low level Attack Patterns in Attributing Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Cyber threat attribution is the process of identifying the actor of an attack incident in cyberspace. An accurate and timely threat attribution plays an important role in deterring future attacks by applying appropriate and timely defense mechanisms. Manual analysis of attack patterns gathered by honeypot deployments, intrusion detection systems, firewalls, and via trace-back procedures is still the preferred method of security analysts for cyber threat attribution. Such attack patterns are low-level Indicators of Compromise (IOC). They represent Tactics, Techniques, Procedures (TTP), and software tools used by the adversaries in their campaigns. The adversaries rarely re-use them. They can also be manipulated, resulting in false and unfair attribution. To empirically evaluate and compare the effectiveness of both kinds of IOC, there are two problems that need to be addressed. The first problem is that in recent research works, the ineffectiveness of low-level IOC for cyber threat attribution has been discussed intuitively. An empirical evaluation for the measure of the effectiveness of low-level IOC based on a real-world dataset is missing. The second problem is that the available dataset for high-level IOC has a single instance for each predictive class label that cannot be used directly for training machine learning models. To address these problems in this research work, we empirically evaluate the effectiveness of low-level IOC based on a real-world dataset that is specifically built for comparative analysis with high-level IOC. The experimental results show that the high-level IOC trained models effectively attribute cyberattacks with an accuracy of 95% as compared to the low-level IOC trained models where accuracy is 40%.
CCTFv1: Computational Modeling of Cyber Team Formation Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Rooted in collaborative efforts, cybersecurity spans the scope of cyber competitions and warfare. Despite extensive research into team strategy in sports and project management, empirical study in cyber-security is minimal. This gap motivates this paper, which presents the Collaborative Cyber Team Formation (CCTF) Simulation Framework. Using Agent-Based Modeling, we delve into the dynamics of team creation and output. We focus on exposing the impact of structural dynamics on performance while controlling other variables carefully. Our findings highlight the importance of strategic team formations, an aspect often overlooked in corporate cybersecurity and cyber competition teams.
The Language Labyrinth: Constructive Critique on the Terminology Used in the AI Discourse
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

In the interdisciplinary field of artificial intelligence (AI) the problem of clear terminology is especially momentous. This paper claims, that AI debates are still characterised by a lack of critical distance to metaphors like 'training', 'learning' or 'deciding'. As consequence, reflections regarding responsibility or potential use-cases are greatly distorted. Yet, if relevant decision-makers are convinced that AI can develop an 'understanding' or properly 'interpret' issues, its regular use for sensitive tasks like deciding about social benefits or judging court cases looms. The chapter argues its claim by analysing central notions of the AI debate and tries to contribute by proposing more fitting terminology and hereby enabling more fruitful debates. It is a conceptual work at the intersection of critical computer science and philosophy of language.
Analyzing sports commentary in order to automatically recognize events and extract insights
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we carefully investigate how we can use multiple different Natural Language Processing techniques and methods in order to automatically recognize the main actions in sports events. We aim to extract insights by analyzing live sport commentaries from different sources and by classifying these major actions into different categories. We also study if sentiment analysis could help detect these main actions.
Polyffusion: A Diffusion Model for Polyphonic Score Generation with Internal and External Controls
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

We propose Polyffusion, a diffusion model that generates polyphonic music scores by regarding music as image-like piano roll representations. The model is capable of controllable music generation with two paradigms: internal control and external control. Internal control refers to the process in which users pre-define a part of the music and then let the model infill the rest, similar to the task of masked music generation (or music inpainting). External control conditions the model with external yet related information, such as chord, texture, or other features, via the cross-attention mechanism. We show that by using internal and external controls, Polyffusion unifies a wide range of music creation tasks, including melody generation given accompaniment, accompaniment generation given melody, arbitrary music segment inpainting, and music arrangement given chords or textures. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms existing Transformer and sampling-based baselines, and using pre-trained disentangled representations as external conditions yields more effective controls.
Beyond the ML Model: Applying Safety Engineering Frameworks to Text-to-Image Development
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Identifying potential social and ethical risks in emerging machine learning (ML) models and their applications remains challenging. In this work, we applied two well-established safety engineering frameworks (FMEA, STPA) to a case study involving text-to-image models at three stages of the ML product development pipeline: data processing, integration of a T2I model with other models, and use. Results of our analysis demonstrate the safety frameworks - both of which are not designed explicitly examine social and ethical risks - can uncover failure and hazards that pose social and ethical risks. We discovered a broad range of failures and hazards (i.e., functional, social, and ethical) by analyzing interactions (i.e., between different ML models in the product, between the ML product and user, and between development teams) and processes (i.e., preparation of training data or workflows for using an ML service/product). Our findings underscore the value and importance of examining beyond an ML model in examining social and ethical risks, especially when we have minimal information about an ML model.
FedBug: A Bottom-Up Gradual Unfreezing Framework for Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Federated Learning (FL) offers a collaborative training framework, allowing multiple clients to contribute to a shared model without compromising data privacy. Due to the heterogeneous nature of local datasets, updated client models may overfit and diverge from one another, commonly known as the problem of client drift. In this paper, we propose FedBug (Federated Learning with Bottom-Up Gradual Unfreezing), a novel FL framework designed to effectively mitigate client drift. FedBug adaptively leverages the client model parameters, distributed by the server at each global round, as the reference points for cross-client alignment. Specifically, on the client side, FedBug begins by freezing the entire model, then gradually unfreezes the layers, from the input layer to the output layer. This bottom-up approach allows models to train the newly thawed layers to project data into a latent space, wherein the separating hyperplanes remain consistent across all clients. We theoretically analyze FedBug in a novel over-parameterization FL setup, revealing its superior convergence rate compared to FedAvg. Through comprehensive experiments, spanning various datasets, training conditions, and network architectures, we validate the efficacy of FedBug. Our contributions encompass a novel FL framework, theoretical analysis, and empirical validation, demonstrating the wide potential and applicability of FedBug.
Reproducibility in Machine Learning-Driven Research
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Research is facing a reproducibility crisis, in which the results and findings of many studies are difficult or even impossible to reproduce. This is also the case in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) research. Often, this is the case due to unpublished data and/or source-code, and due to sensitivity to ML training conditions. Although different solutions to address this issue are discussed in the research community such as using ML platforms, the level of reproducibility in ML-driven research is not increasing substantially. Therefore, in this mini survey, we review the literature on reproducibility in ML-driven research with three main aims: (i) reflect on the current situation of ML reproducibility in various research fields, (ii) identify reproducibility issues and barriers that exist in these research fields applying ML, and (iii) identify potential drivers such as tools, practices, and interventions that support ML reproducibility. With this, we hope to contribute to decisions on the viability of different solutions for supporting ML reproducibility.
Edge-set reduction to efficiently solve the graph partitioning problem with the genetic algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

The graph partitioning problem (GPP) is among the most challenging models in optimization. Because of its NP-hardness, the researchers directed their interest towards approximate methods such as the genetic algorithms (GA). The edge-based GA has shown promising results when solving GPP. However, for big dense instances, the size of the encoding representation becomes too huge and affects GA's efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the impact of modifying the size of the chromosomes on the edge based GA by reducing the GPP edge set. We study the GA performance with different levels of reductions, and we report the obtained results.
Reducing Ambiguities in Line-based Density Plots by Image-space Colorization
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

Line-based density plots are used to reduce visual clutter in line charts with a multitude of individual lines. However, these traditional density plots are often perceived ambiguously, which obstructs the user's identification of underlying trends in complex datasets. Thus, we propose a novel image space coloring method for line-based density plots that enhances their interpretability. Our method employs color not only to visually communicate data density but also to highlight similar regions in the plot, allowing users to identify and distinguish trends easily. We achieve this by performing hierarchical clustering based on the lines passing through each region and mapping the identified clusters to the hue circle using circular MDS. Additionally, we propose a heuristic approach to assign each line to the most probable cluster, enabling users to analyze density and individual lines. We motivate our method by conducting a small-scale user study, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method using synthetic and real-world datasets, and providing an interactive online tool for generating colored line-based density plots.
Attacking by Aligning: Clean-Label Backdoor Attacks on Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown unprecedented success in object detection tasks. However, it was also discovered that DNNs are vulnerable to multiple kinds of attacks, including Backdoor Attacks. Through the attack, the attacker manages to embed a hidden backdoor into the DNN such that the model behaves normally on benign data samples, but makes attacker-specified judgments given the occurrence of a predefined trigger. Although numerous backdoor attacks have been experimented on image classification, backdoor attacks on object detection tasks have not been properly investigated and explored. As object detection has been adopted as an important module in multiple security-sensitive applications such as autonomous driving, backdoor attacks on object detection could pose even more severe threats. Inspired by the inherent property of deep learning-based object detectors, we propose a simple yet effective backdoor attack method against object detection without modifying the ground truth annotations, specifically focusing on the object disappearance attack and object generation attack. Extensive experiments and ablation studies prove the effectiveness of our attack on the benchmark object detection dataset MSCOCO2017, on which we achieve an attack success rate of more than 92% with a poison rate of only 5%.
Abusing Images and Sounds for Indirect Instruction Injection in Multi-Modal LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

We demonstrate how images and sounds can be used for indirect prompt and instruction injection in multi-modal LLMs. An attacker generates an adversarial perturbation corresponding to the prompt and blends it into an image or audio recording. When the user asks the (unmodified, benign) model about the perturbed image or audio, the perturbation steers the model to output the attacker-chosen text and/or make the subsequent dialog follow the attacker's instruction. We illustrate this attack with several proof-of-concept examples targeting LLaVa and PandaGPT.
Blockchain-Based Federated Learning: Incentivizing Data Sharing and Penalizing Dishonest Behavior
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

With the increasing importance of data sharing for collaboration and innovation, it is becoming more important to ensure that data is managed and shared in a secure and trustworthy manner. Data governance is a common approach to managing data, but it faces many challenges such as data silos, data consistency, privacy, security, and access control. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a comprehensive framework that integrates data trust in federated learning with InterPlanetary File System, blockchain, and smart contracts to facilitate secure and mutually beneficial data sharing while providing incentives, access control mechanisms, and penalizing any dishonest behavior. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is effective in improving the accuracy of federated learning models while ensuring the security and fairness of the data-sharing process. The research paper also presents a decentralized federated learning platform that successfully trained a CNN model on the MNIST dataset using blockchain technology. The platform enables multiple workers to train the model simultaneously while maintaining data privacy and security. The decentralized architecture and use of blockchain technology allow for efficient communication and coordination between workers. This platform has the potential to facilitate decentralized machine learning and support privacy-preserving collaboration in various domains.
General Debiasing for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Existing work on Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) utilizes multimodal information for prediction yet unavoidably suffers from fitting the spurious correlations between multimodal features and sentiment labels. For example, if most videos with a blue background have positive labels in a dataset, the model will rely on such correlations for prediction, while "blue background" is not a sentiment-related feature. To address this problem, we define a general debiasing MSA task, which aims to enhance the Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization ability of MSA models by reducing their reliance on spurious correlations. To this end, we propose a general debiasing framework based on Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW), which adaptively assigns small weights to the samples with larger bias (i.e., the severer spurious correlations). The key to this debiasing framework is to estimate the bias of each sample, which is achieved by two steps: 1) disentangling the robust features and biased features in each modality, and 2) utilizing the biased features to estimate the bias. Finally, we employ IPW to reduce the effects of large-biased samples, facilitating robust feature learning for sentiment prediction. To examine the model's generalization ability, we keep the original testing sets on two benchmarks and additionally construct multiple unimodal and multimodal OOD testing sets. The empirical results demonstrate the superior generalization ability of our proposed framework. We have released the code and data to facilitate the reproduction https://github.com/Teng-Sun/GEAR.
Technology in Association With Mental Health: Meta-ethnography
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

This research paper presents a meta-analysis of the multifaceted role of technology in mental health. The pervasive influence of technology on daily lives necessitates a deep understanding of its impact on mental health services. This study synthesizes literature covering Behavioral Intervention Technologies (BITs), digital mental health interventions during COVID-19, young men's attitudes toward mental health technologies, technology-based interventions for university students, and the applicability of mobile health technologies for individuals with serious mental illnesses. BITs are recognized for their potential to provide evidence-based interventions for mental health conditions, especially anxiety disorders. The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for the adoption of digital mental health services, underscoring their crucial role in providing accessible and quality care; however, their efficacy needs to be reinforced by workforce training, high-quality evidence, and digital equity. A nuanced understanding of young men's attitudes toward mental health is imperative for devising effective online services. Technology-based interventions for university students are promising, although variable in effectiveness; their deployment must be evidence-based and tailored to individual needs. Mobile health technologies, particularly activity tracking, hold promise for individuals with serious mental illnesses. Collectively, technology has immense potential to revolutionize mental health care. However, the implementation must be evidence-based, ethical, and equitable, with continued research focusing on experiences across diverse populations, ensuring accessibility and efficacy for all.
The best multicore-parallelization refactoring you've never heard of
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

In this short paper, we explore a new way to refactor a simple but tricky-to-parallelize tree-traversal algorithm to harness multicore parallelism. Crucially, the refactoring draws from some classic techniques from programming-languages research, such as the continuation-passing-style transform and defunctionalization. The algorithm we consider faces a particularly acute granularity-control challenge, owing to the wide range of inputs it has to deal with. Our solution achieves efficiency from heartbeat scheduling, a recent approach to automatic granularity control. We present our solution in a series of individually simple refactoring steps, starting from a high-level, recursive specification of the algorithm. As such, our approach may prove useful as a teaching tool, and perhaps be used for one-off parallelizations, as the technique requires no special compiler support.
FACADE: A Framework for Adversarial Circuit Anomaly Detection and Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present FACADE, a novel probabilistic and geometric framework designed for unsupervised mechanistic anomaly detection in deep neural networks. Its primary goal is advancing the understanding and mitigation of adversarial attacks. FACADE aims to generate probabilistic distributions over circuits, which provide critical insights to their contribution to changes in the manifold properties of pseudo-classes, or high-dimensional modes in activation space, yielding a powerful tool for uncovering and combating adversarial attacks. Our approach seeks to improve model robustness, enhance scalable model oversight, and demonstrates promising applications in real-world deployment settings.
SecureBoost Hyperparameter Tuning via Multi-Objective Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

SecureBoost is a tree-boosting algorithm leveraging homomorphic encryption to protect data privacy in vertical federated learning setting. It is widely used in fields such as finance and healthcare due to its interpretability, effectiveness, and privacy-preserving capability. However, SecureBoost suffers from high computational complexity and risk of label leakage. To harness the full potential of SecureBoost, hyperparameters of SecureBoost should be carefully chosen to strike an optimal balance between utility, efficiency, and privacy. Existing methods either set hyperparameters empirically or heuristically, which are far from optimal. To fill this gap, we propose a Constrained Multi-Objective SecureBoost (CMOSB) algorithm to find Pareto optimal solutions that each solution is a set of hyperparameters achieving optimal tradeoff between utility loss, training cost, and privacy leakage. We design measurements of the three objectives. In particular, the privacy leakage is measured using our proposed instance clustering attack. Experimental results demonstrate that the CMOSB yields not only hyperparameters superior to the baseline but also optimal sets of hyperparameters that can support the flexible requirements of FL participants.
Intelligent model for offshore China sea fog forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Accurate and timely prediction of sea fog is very important for effectively managing maritime and coastal economic activities. Given the intricate nature and inherent variability of sea fog, traditional numerical and statistical forecasting methods are often proven inadequate. This study aims to develop an advanced sea fog forecasting method embedded in a numerical weather prediction model using the Yangtze River Estuary (YRE) coastal area as a case study. Prior to training our machine learning model, we employ a time-lagged correlation analysis technique to identify key predictors and decipher the underlying mechanisms driving sea fog occurrence. In addition, we implement ensemble learning and a focal loss function to address the issue of imbalanced data, thereby enhancing the predictive ability of our model. To verify the accuracy of our method, we evaluate its performance using a comprehensive dataset spanning one year, which encompasses both weather station observations and historical forecasts. Remarkably, our machine learning-based approach surpasses the predictive performance of two conventional methods, the weather research and forecasting nonhydrostatic mesoscale model (WRF-NMM) and the algorithm developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL). Specifically, in regard to predicting sea fog with a visibility of less than or equal to 1 km with a lead time of 60 hours, our methodology achieves superior results by increasing the probability of detection (POD) while simultaneously reducing the false alarm ratio (FAR).
Challenges and Solutions in AI for All
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI)'s pervasive presence and variety necessitate diversity and inclusivity (D&I) principles in its design for fairness, trust, and transparency. Yet, these considerations are often overlooked, leading to issues of bias, discrimination, and perceived untrustworthiness. In response, we conducted a Systematic Review to unearth challenges and solutions relating to D&I in AI. Our rigorous search yielded 48 research articles published between 2017 and 2022. Open coding of these papers revealed 55 unique challenges and 33 solutions for D&I in AI, as well as 24 unique challenges and 23 solutions for enhancing such practices using AI. This study, by offering a deeper understanding of these issues, will enlighten researchers and practitioners seeking to integrate these principles into future AI systems.